There are many ways for people to access visual information about a certain real-world event, person, and/or landscape. For example, printed photos on books, newspapers, photographs, television programs, motion pictures, web pages with embedded photos, and web-based photo-sharing services are some of many ways for accessing visual information on. A common characteristic of these approaches is that a publisher decides and determines how a visual information is presented. In a conventional method of presentation of visual information, visual information provided to a viewer is a reflection of a publisher's point of view rather than a point of view preferred and/or desired by a particular viewer.
Although existing video-on-demand services from cable and satellite TV providers and some web services allow customers to order and view movies and pre-recorded programs, a customer still cannot directly influence or participate in a visual-information-capturing process and select various viewpoints in a timely fashion. Furthermore, in the music industry, Napster is a widely-known example of peer-to-peer music file sharing. Services such as Napster enable a mass number of independent participants to share music files. Peer-to-peer music file-swapping services such as Napster focus on data-sharing instead of data creation demanded and/or driven by one or more peers. In addition, although web-blogging has been a popular trend in recent years due to a blogger's ability to share his or her own point of view with other peers, blog contents are not typically driven by demand of other peers and they are still a mere collection of messages accentuating the blogger's own perspective.
The conventional methods of sharing visual information do not accommodate interested consumers who want to proactively participate in a decision-making process for capturing or producing visual information of real-world events, people, and/or landscapes. Typically, the visual viewpoints of an event from an information producer or an information provider cannot be controlled, switched, or adjusted by a consumer. Because many individuals in recent years commonly carry visual-information-capturing devices such as digital cameras or cell phones with embedded camera features, a potential pool of visual information providers who may be capable of providing visual information based on a viewer's and/or a consumer's particular request, requirement, or desire is generally unutilized but very substantial.
Therefore, it may be desirable to devise a novel apparatus and a method for capturing, producing, and/or sharing visual information based on a consumer's particular requirement, desire, or request to a peer subject, which may be an individual or a business entity.